HONOLULU - Frustrated by what he sees as a never-ending campaign to undermine President Barack Obama, Hawaii's new governor says he plans to use his post to counter conspiracy theorists who continue to allege that the president was not born in the United States.
Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat who took office Dec. 6, has known Obama since the president's days growing up in Hawaii. He's also one of the few people who knew both Obama's father, also named Barack, and mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.
That long-standing relationship is a major reason that Abercrombie, 72, takes umbrage with the persistent effort by Obama's most-ardent foes to assert that he was born in Kenya, which would constitutionally bar him from holding the office of president.
"Now that I'm governor, I'm going to do something about that," Abercrombie vowed.
Abercrombie, who for 19 years represented Hawaii's 1st District as one of the more-liberal members of Congress, acknowledged that he has not determined a specific remedy.
"What bothers me is that some people who should know better are trying to use this for political reasons," he said. Leaning forward from behind his desk in his capital office, he added: "Maybe I'm the only one in the country that could look you right in the eye right now and tell you, 'I was here when that baby was born.'"
One of Abercrombie's aides said the governor is voicing the frustration of many Hawaiians who continue to be troubled by the rumors, which they see as emblematic of the view that Hawaiians are not Americans in the same way as those who live in the continental United States.
Abercrombie, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., came to Hawaii in 1959 to study sociology at the University of Hawaii. As a teaching assistant, he met and befriended Obama's father, a native of Kenya.
Obama's mother was born in Kansas and met and married his father while the two were college students in Hawaii. Obama was born at Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.
But in 2008, as Obama
ran for president, allegations appeared online among "birthers" claiming, without proof, that he was born
in Kenya.
That June, the Obama campaign released a Certificate of Live Birth - an official document from the Hawaii Health Department certifying the facts of a person's birth - as proof of
his birthplace.
Investigations by two prominent fact-checking organizations, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, concluded that the certificate was authentic. FactCheck also turned up a 1961 birth announcement in a local newspaper, The Honolulu Advertiser, marking the
birth of a son to "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of Kalanianaole Hwy."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Sunday, December 26th 2010 at 4:34PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
